An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

A Look Back at the Religious Right as it was Gathering Steam

Note:Back in the infancy of this blog, on June 19, 2006, I posted this piece
based on then new books chronicling the rise of the Religious Right.What has
change since then?Well, the Tea Party and the aggressive decision
by the billionaires funding the movement to cement a wider popular base for
their real objective of enriching themselves and establishing an absolute
oligarchy has meant that social conservatives have finally been handed real
victories in their fight against modernity, science, and for sexual subjugation
and the domination of women.And they
have returned the favor by endorsing the whole supposedly Libertarian agenda to
dissolve most government to empower corporations.Moderates have been driven out of the Republican Party,
but neither the Religious Right nor the
oligarchs care.They care only for the
powerful discipline of lock-step unity.They
remain at odds with the majority of the country on issue after issue, but the
majority is fragmented, alienated by the political process, and to often
apathetic or discouraged.That makes the
Religious Right even more dangerous today.Anyway, this is how I saw it six years ago.

Is
the United
States
becoming a Theocracy?Tough question and
one much on our minds these days.Two
recent books have stirred discussion, Michelle
Goldberg’sKingdom Coming:The Rise of
Christian Nationalism and American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics
of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed money in the 21st Century (whew!)
by Kevin Phillips.

These religious
forces have been organized by their leaders and the Republican Party into the most disciplined mass voting bloc since
white Southern Democrats once held
sway over the South.The ascendancy of
the Republican revolution owes its success largely to this irreducible and
reliable base.

Goldberg, a senior writer for Salon.com, is positively
alarmist.Evangelicals, she points out represent 30-35% of the population.Add other religious conservatives including
right wing Catholics, traditional Jews,
and disaffected members of mainstream
Protestant denominations and the figure approaches half of all
Americans.That makes this group, by far
the largest identifiable and cohesive sub-culture in an increasingly fragmented
society.By sheer numbers they are bound
to have enormous influence.

For his part
Philips, the former Republican strategist who developed the Southern Strategy before defecting to
the left, put this raw power in perspective as part of the Republican
juggernaught.

Republicans have
risen to power in an intricate and sometime contradictory coalition which has
included fiscal conservatives, libertarians, neo-imperialists (usually called
neo-conservatives), main street business types, and traditional
reactionaries.But the two dominate
pillars have been the so called Religious
Right (RR) and the corporate
interests of the super rich.The RR has
provided bodies, votes, and fervor.The
corporatists have provided unlimited money, a pervasive willingness to engage
in flagrant corruption, and a determination to use ideology to free business
from all constraint to accomplish the largest transfer of wealth (poor and
middle class to the oligarchy) in history.Woven together by the genius of the likes of Newt Gingrich, Carl Rove,
Pat Robinson, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay, et. al. these two forces drove the
Republican Party to unheard of political dominance over all three branched of
government in record time.They dragged
the other members of the coalition behind them on the roller coaster thrill
ride to power.

But just when it
seemed that total and permanent power was within their grasp, trouble appeared
in Paradise.That
trouble came in the guise of a failed war in Iraq
which shook public confidence in their leadership and exposed the too, too
apparent frailties of the stooge-front man for the operation, George W. Bush.

All of this time
the religious conservatives were sure that they were using the corporatists and
the Grand Oligarchs were equally sure that the gullible church folks were their
tools.They were able to stroke each other’s
pet projects—tax reform for action
against abortion and Gay marriage.

Yet in the end,
despite all of their power, neither side was able to pick the golden fruit of
their most cherished dreams.The RR’s
dutifully supported gutting Social
Security, slashing taxes, rolling back environmental, health, and other
regulations.But other than a lot of
rhetoric and the appointment of a few judges, they never really got the Mogul’s
full support for their most cherished dreams.Despite their best efforts the Corporatists could not get repeal of capital gains or the estate tax, drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, or the
dismantlement of Social Security.They
blamed insufficient zeal on the part of their religious allies.

While the
pillars of the coalition are under strain, the fringe participants are jumping
ship.First to go were the traditional
balance-the-budget fiscal conservatives, appalled by the Bush spending frenzy
yoked to relentless tax cuts which has sent the budget from surplus to
mega-deficit in just six years.Hot on
their heels are the social libertarians equally frightened by the RR’s zeal to
regulate every aspect of personal behavior on one hand and the neo-imperialists
gleeful embrace of a coercive security
state on the other.Small and
mid-level business types, the back bone of the Eisenhower Republican Party, no longer see their interests tied to
those of ruthless multi-national conglomerate corporations.The neo-imperialists are frustrated by the
neo-isolationists.And to top it off the
immigration issue pops up cleaving corporate interests from the nativist
populists.

This bodes ill
for the political future of true theocracy.But never discount its tenacity and power.

There are also
problems within the RR itself.It was
never as monolithic as it seems from the outside, where it is identified almost
exclusively with Evangelical Christianity.Certainly the Evangelicals are the biggest part of the pie, but they are
not the whole bakery.Most deny that
they are actually seeking temporal power, only that their cultural
sensitivities be respected and their moral norms adhered to.The vast majority, even of the leadership, do
not seek a Christian theocracy.

The Southern Baptists, now the nation’s
largest Protestant church and surely its most muscular, is the eight hundred
pound gorilla of the RR.At their recent
convention, they elected a “moderate” who seemed less interested in making
cultural and political warfare the central mission of the church.A move to direct Baptists to withdraw their
children from public schools as inherently and irredeemably secular,
failed.But in an ominous move, Baptists
were instructed to return to their communities and capture school boards,
library boards, and local governments.Essentially the Baptists were telling the national Republicans that they
were withdrawing their focus on Congressional action, where they cannot win
their goals, to the local level where they know they can demographically hold
sway over most of the South and a good deal of the West.That’s bad for the Republicans nationally,
but may also be bad for proponents of church/state separation locally.

One relatively
small sliver of the RR actually has its eyes set on true Theocracy.The Christian
Dominionist movement grew out of Calvinism
arisen from the ashes just about everyone one thought it was
consigned.It lived on in a few academic
corners and in a strain of rock-ribbed Presbyterianism that long split from
their now liberal main denomination.Taking Calvin’s dictatorship
of Geneva as a model, this hearty
band advocates the establishment of a Christian
Nation with only certified Christians able to vote or hold office.This group has grown from a handful of
intellectuals and thinkers into a real movement which has infiltrated the
larger RR and the Republican hierarchy.Several top [Bush] Administration figures are at least tangentially
associated with this movement.

Ironically the
main allies of the Dominionists are Catholic intellectuals rooted in Natural Law philosophy on one hand and
an admiration for rigid hierarchy on the other.Bob Jones University not
producing many first class legal minds, it has been from this group that
Catholic lawyers have been recruited to top justice department posts and the
judicial appointments so dear to the RR.These are the men, and they are almost exclusively male, that George
Bush taps to take over the appellate bench and Supreme Court.They are the
insurance policy that even if Republicans loose power in the legislative or
executive branches, their revolutionary changes to American governance and
society will remain in place.

But there is
something inherently unstable and ultimately unsustainable about an alliance
of resurrected Calvinists and Opus Dei
Catholics.

Another shaky
alliance is between Evangelical Protestants and the neo-imperialists, largely
Jewish intellectuals keenly interested it the use of American power to advance Israeli safety and interests.Evangelicals have become a powerful block in
the pro Israel
lobby.But that comes not out of any
fondness for Jews, indeed Fundamentalists
and other Evangelicals have a history of anti-Semitism, but out of their
end-time fantasies in which Armageddon
is played out on the ashes of the Holy
Land.

All of these
stresses mitigate against the ascension to power of a true theocracy, but none
prevent it.Vigilance and action are
always needed or the nation can, as many hope it will, slip quietly into a
virtual theocracy draped in the empty forms of Enlightenment democracy.

Unitarian Universalists, the religious
heirs of the Enlightenment, have a
special responsibility to fight the good fight.But we can’t do it alone.We must
find allies among the fading Mainline Protestant denominations, progressive
Evangelicals like Jim Wallis of Sojournersand former President Jimmy Carter, Reform and
other liberal Jews like Rabbi Michael
Lerner of Tikkun, and other spiritual voices
to present an authentic religious voice that stands against Theocracy and in defense of Democracy.Fortunately, that effort is now underway in
organizations like the Interfaith Alliance.